In the manufacturing industry, the optimization of a product manufacturing schedule or a prototype test schedule is important to reduce/suppress the period and costs involved in the production or the period and costs involved in testing. Further, in the manufacture of automobiles, there are many test items such as prototypes. Since each test item is performed in a different test sector (hereinafter also called a “user”), there is a need to optimize (adjust) a test schedule to satisfy requirements from multiple test sectors.
As a tool available for the optimization, for example, there is optimization software using mathematical programming such as CPLEX (registered trademark). Japanese Patent Application Publication no. 2007-148635 discloses a production scheduling method for products using optimization calculation by mathematical programming. Japanese Patent Application Publication no. 2013-143030 discloses an operation schedule preparation method of steel making processes using optimization calculation by mathematical programming after a process having high occupancy of a processing facility is set as a bottleneck process.
However, in conventional scheduling methods including the methods disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publications no. 2007-148635 and no. 2013-143030, the optimization calculation is mainly used to assign an item to be processed in time to each manufacturing resource, and is not always sufficient to optimize (adjust) a test schedule to satisfy the requirements from multiple test sectors mentioned above. In other words, since it is difficult for the conventional methods to represent an objective function and constraint conditions satisfactory to test sectors, it is difficult to create/present a test schedule plan satisfactory to multiple users.